Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT All My Darling Daughters
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 18 | Aired on 03.06.2009
Kara's beautiful face is wearing a look of calm it hasn't since she was in the Viper, right before it happened. She looks at the Wall and weeps, but not in anguish. Not everything is fire and explosions and cramps all the time: sometimes you just let it go, and it hurts in a new way, a quiet way. It doesn't always have to hurt for us to learn: New for her. Lee comes up behind, worried, but when she turns to face him, she's already smiling. Sometimes he's unbearably wonderful.
"Okay, listen to me. I don't care, all right? I don't... We've all been through some crazy, crazy stuff. I don't care what you think you saw. I watched your Viper explode. Don't care. I'm here, you're here. That is all that matters." He touches her face and she smiles, but can't speak yet. It's too big. It's the last piece. "Okay. See you, around..." She grins as he takes off, awkwardly, and he tosses a smile back over his shoulder: "...Kara Thrace!"
Because you're just Kara. You are my Kara.
Strength, and wisdom. And a measure of acceptance. She stands on the water's edge: in her hands she holds two jugs of water, pouring one back into the river, and one onto the ground. She brings water to the river, life to the shore. Kara Thrace laughs through her tears, and puts the photograph back where it belongs, between Kat and Dualla. All the darling daughters. And of all the things she ever thought or felt about that girl in the photo, once upon a time, what used to be the hardest is the easiest of all: just to love her.
The Colony is sixty bad dreams at once, dreams about bugs and scorpions and Babylon 5, nightmares about the limits of CGI in 2009. Boomer lands the Raptor, finally, and brings Hera in through bright halls and dark corridors, code climbing up the walls. Her exhaustion is written in her back and on her face. Cavil's delighted to see her; she gives a fairly good impression of pride and triumph. John practically rubs his hands together with glee at how sad Ellen will be now, knowing she was the Trojan Horse for this.
I am just so grossed out by Cavil. There are so many lines crossed here, generationally: the way that humanity laughed off its accountability for its children, the way Cavil has worked those intergenerational lines from every angle, out of his own sickness. The stuff he wants from Boomer, that nobody should want. But I will tell you this: without Cavil, Boomer never would have gotten over Dionne, because she never would have spent those scores of jumps with Hera enough to come back to the world. She's not Boomer's daughter, but she is a daughter. Just like Boomer is. And there's something good in that. Boomer, watching Hera jumping on the bed, remembered false memories of her own never-was childhood, and that gave her something back.